Fingers of Fear

by J. U. Nicolson

  I wondered, for an instant, whether Doctor Barnes, when he arrived, could be hoodwinked into supposing that the ragged wounds on Alice Hobbs’s neck had been made by the clean, sharp teeth of a dog. But as I remember back upon the events of that night and of the emotions which swayed my actions, I think that my predominant reason for wanting to find Gray before harm came to her and before anyone else could find her was one of pity. It had been only last evening, before she came to me in the library, that I was revolving dreams of love for her. The madness of which she was victim was an inherited madness, for which she could in no least wise be blamed. Surely, for all my loathing of her deeds and for all the horror with which the sight of her had inspired me, standing as she had before that panel and reaching out her dripping arms to embrace me, surely the tenderness I had yesterday felt could excuse my present wish to shield her, even from herself.

  I climbed to the passage leading away from the chimney and came to the panel between the passage and the library. Pulling it aside, by means of the handle, I stepped through it, carefully playing the beam of my torch ahead of me, since the interior of the house was only beginning to be lightened by the day outside. There appeared to be no one in the room. Then I turned to examine the panel itself, striving to learn the secret of opening it from the side on which I now stood. I spent some minutes at the task. The bookshelves slid sidewise with the panel—so much was plain. They had been very carefully cut and fitted, so as to move in grooves in the shelves to the right—I mean, of course, the permanent shelves to the right. It was evident, however, that the panel itself could not have been moved to the right had the shelves it carried on its face been loaded with books. That accounted for the fact that they held only a few books at the present time, and those volumes had been thrown down onto their sides by movement of the sliding shelves. As I have previously said, the opening was just a foot in width. But I could not discover the lever or other agency by which the thing could be moved, once it was closed, and I was losing valuable time from my search. If Gray had been killed by those dogs, I wanted to find her body—or what should be left of it—before strangers arrived on the scene. I was about to turn away, toward the door through which one might gain into the dining room. A tiny sound held me.

  It was a slight swishing, as of silken garments. My Lady in Mauve? But I could see no one. Then I thrust my head through the opening in the shelves and threw the beam of my flashlight along the passage.

  The Lady in Mauve stood before me, just at the head of the iron steps!

  Straight into the glare of my torch she looked. Her eyes did not blink. Not a muscle (if ghosts have muscles!) moved in that lovely face.

  Suddenly, from my nerveless fingers, the torch fell with a thud to the floor. The light disappeared. I remained in semi-darkness. I bent swiftly, groping over the floor for the flashlight. I spent several seconds finding it. And when I had secured it, and had again spread its light along the passage, the Lady had disappeared.

  Had she passed me? For she had seemed to be coming toward the little unpainted pine door when stopped by the light I had caught her in. Or had she gone down the stairs?

  I would follow her! Somehow, I was not afraid of this beautiful creature. I ran into the passage and along it. At the top of the stairs I paused. Fear came upon me for a single moment. But I mastered it. Slowly, deliberately, I went down the stairs until I had come, at last, to the foot of them.

  The little room down there was absolutely empty.

  Moreover, now I thought of it, the little room had been empty during the time of my first visit to it. Yet a few minutes later, while I still examined the panel, upstairs, the Lady in Mauve had come to the passage. And she could only have come there from this little room.

  But though I carefully examined every square inch of the masonry about me, some of which had been coated with cement, some of which was of gray granite, and some of which was brickwork, I could find no slightest evidence of an opening anywhere. I had concluded, upon finding the passage back of the library, that the Lady in Mauve had been a flesh-and-blood woman, after all. Had that conclusion been too hastily made? Might not a ghost have made use of the opening I had lately been examining?

  Thinking of such things, I slowly climbed back to the top of the stairs. It was no less imperative that I go outside and search for Gray Ormes. I must leave the mystery of how the Lady had come up those stairs behind me until a later time. Therefore I left the library, went to the front door of the house and let myself out, carefully springing the lock so that I should be able to enter again without ringing the bell.

  The black darkness about the house was now much diluted by light from over the eastern peaks. Shadows under the trees were still very heavy. But after a few moments my eyes had become sufficiently accustomed to their surroundings to make out objects with fair distinctness to a distance of forty or fifty feet. I heard nothing of the pack. Very quietly I slipped away from the door and took my way around a corner of the house leading towards that wing containing the library. I carried the whip in my left hand, having made sure that the little revolver was in a handy pocket. But if the dogs at Ormesby were depended upon to keep away prowling men, they might as well have been dispensed with, or so I thought at the moment. I continued without molestation around the long wing and came to a stand well to the rear of the place. Back of me rose the trees, becoming more abundant as they moved uphill from the grounds. And then, far away, and coming rapidly toward me, I heard the barking and baying of the entire wolfish pack.

  I looked swiftly about for some place of safety. I did not want to retreat into the house, nor did I wish to climb into a tree and sit there helplessly. The only other thing offering shelter was the garage, and I ran for it. I had not more than two hundred feet to go, but before I had covered the distance the leading dogs had gained almost upon me. How they had learned of my presence in the grounds I do not know; probably their sense of smell had told them that a stranger was abroad, or their preternaturally keen sense of hearing had informed them. Whatever the means, my estimate of their watchfulness was vastly augmented during the few seconds I needed to run to the garage door, fling it back on its rails and enter, barely in time to escape the rush of three big brutes which hurled their bodies against the door even as I was closing it. I was safe enough, but I might just as well have remained within the house. In the house I had at least learned something —I had explored the secret passage from end to end. Now I could only sit quiet and wait for Hobbs to call the dogs away, unless I fired my revolver and brought him sooner than he might otherwise be expected to come looking for me. And I did not want to do that. Since I had found no traces of Gray’s body, though, it must be admitted, I had not searched either very far or very diligently for it, it might be that she had not been harmed. If that were the case, then she would probably hear the shot and come herself to investigate. I dreaded seeing her again, even though she might be quite sane now. I had loved the girl too recently to be yet wholly healed of the hurt her madness had given. Meanwhile I could amuse myself by an examination of the cars in the place. Yesterday, when I had been in there, I had been too preoccupied to see more than the coupé I had received permission to use.

  There were three cars. A large, expensive sport roadster I assumed to belong to Agnes, since she had told me of possessing a new motor, which she was not pleased with. There was the coupé I had yesterday driven. And there was a small sedan of cheap make which I took, from its somewhat battered and disreputable appearance, to be devoted to use of the servants. There was a large work bench running the length of the building at one side. This was covered with tools, pots of grease, worn-out inner tubes, all the odds and ends that accumulate about such places. I was in no wise interested in the articles I was seeing by aid of my flashlight. But my mind was busy with the problem of what was to be done with Gray. It was not my problem to solve, and yet I worried over it as much as if it had been.
If she were sane today, how could I face her, how could anyone face her, and demand that she leave Ormesby for confinement in some institution where, in her next outbreak of frenzy, she could do no one any harm? It would be like striking her across the face. I didn’t see how it was to be accomplished, by myself or by another. And I continued for several minutes to gaze carefully at this small tool broken and at that gearing, hardly conscious of what I was seeing. It was in this way, however, that I came, quite by accident, upon the blood-stained stockings.

  I thought at the first that they were dirty rags which had been used for wiping one of the cars. But they were tan silk stockings, a woman’s, of sheerest weave, and I noticed—by the merest accident, as I said—that they bore blood stains. More than that, the blood upon them was fresh. It had not yet lost its bright red color. Someone had thrown those stockings upon the bench within the period of but fifteen or twenty minutes before I entered the place.

  But where had that person gone? If it were a woman, where had she gone after leaving her stockings here? How came they to be blood-stained? More than that, how came one of them to be soaked in blood to the knee? The blood was fresh. I did not think, upon reflection, that a man had left them there. I was thinking of Gray Ormes. She had been quite naked when I last saw her, but of course she had had ample time in which to resume her clothing. Still, she had not worn stockings during our meeting the previous evening. If she had dressed, then, it must have been in other clothes than those she had discarded in the library. Her frenzy might have passed. It could not, then, have been her scream I had heard among the dogs. But whose blood was I now looking at as I dangled one of the silken things from a finger?

  One thing seemed self-evident now. If this was a further trace of Gray’s work, then, be it as difficult as it might be, she must be taken away from Ormsby and confined somewhere in safety. These fits of fury were recurring too frequently. Surely she must have been placed in an asylum before this if they had attacked her so often in the past. No, I could not help thinking that she might have become permanently deranged. I must get back into the house, somehow, obtain Ormond’s address from Hobbs, perhaps, and call him on the telephone. After that I ought to be leaving the place, though I did not resolve to leave before Ormes’s arrival.

  A small sound disturbed me. The dogs outside had withdrawn and it was not a sound made by one of them. I do not know why it attracted my attention, save that, with the ear for mechanical maladjustment which seems to have become the normal heritage of my generation of Americans, I supposed that one of the cars leaked oil. I wondered which one it was, idly thinking that I must mention the matter to Hobbs, so that he could remedy it or have it looked after by a professional mechanic. Moreover, tense as I was from discovery of the stockings, and weary with my night’s adventures, I caught at small happenings and fixed my attention upon them to save my nerves from snapping. I listened. There was no doubt of it. Oil, or some other liquid, dripped onto the concrete floor in the neighborhood of one of the cars. So then I stooped far enough forward to follow with my eyes the beam of the torch; and under the coupé I saw what it was. Something dark dripped from the body of that machine.

  But it was not oil. Even with my first glance at it, I knew it was not oil. It was blood.

  So knowing, I surmised that I had come upon the object of my search. I steeled myself to look through the window of the car door. Gray would be there, probably she had killed herself. Perhaps, regaining sanity and remembering something of what she had done, she had fled here and slain herself to escape the horror of living in her own body. Slowly I approached the car. I hated to look. Yet it must be done. And now I would do it.

  The corpse in the car, however, was not Gray’s. It was that of Agnes Ormes.

  But I had left Agnes in her own room, as I passed it, not half an hour since. I had plainly heard some person moving within that room. It might have been someone else, but I had seemed to recognize the sounds as having been made by the ineffectual Mrs. Ormes. We habitually recognize sound in this way, though, when put to it, we are at a loss to explain why we have so recognized it. Also, I had heard voices in Barbara’s room. Had Agnes come here while I explored the little room at the foot of the winding iron stairs? Had she been here longer than that? I could not answer those questions. But the fact that I was looking upon her body appeared to prove that Gray had not returned to the house.

  Agnes was quite dead. Her throat had been cut, deeply and with a very sharp instrument, for the head was all but severed. And it was not her stockings I had found on the bench. Agnes had come or had been brought here wearing the clothing she had worn when I last looked upon her in her life. That had been a nurse’s white apron and cap, with black stockings and with black shoes. I very well remembered the stockings. When she had risen from her bed to go with me to Mrs. Hobbs’s aid as she lay in the miserable little room, I had seen her legs from ankle to calf under her thin dressing gown, and I had then noticed, idly and without giving the small matter any attention, for I was not interested in Mrs. Ormes’s body, that her calves were more hairy than a woman’s usually are. Therefore, when I later saw her in the Hobbses’ room, my eyes had wandered of themselves to rest upon her lower legs, and the black silk stockings had then caught my attention, perhaps because one sees them so seldom nowadays.

  But the most horrifying thing was the discovery, which I immediately made, that the woman’s throat had been first slashed with a sharp knife, probably a razor, and then torn farther open as if by the insertion of fingers into the gaping wound. Also, it had been gnawed!

  There was no doubt of it. I had seen flesh gnawed by dogs, and I had recently seen the throat of Alice Hobbs. Gray had been here. Gray must be still abroad.

  There was no blood on the outside of the car, save a great splotch of it across the nickeled handle of the door. But now, looking closely, I saw that drops of it led to the bench where I had found the stockings. The murderess had wiped her hands on the silken things. Probably they had been already lying there. They need not have been Gray’s; at least, they need not recently have been upon her legs. The interior of the car was splashed and soaked with blood, as, naturally, it must have been. I judged that Agnes had been killed after entering the car. Perhaps she had intended driving to the village for something, maybe for something needed by the patient upstairs. Perhaps she intended driving the coupé because she did not like driving her own new machine. A great pool of blood lay on the rubber mat beneath her feet, and it was from this pool that the dripping came. There were the marks of bloody hands on the victim’s face and on one shoulder and on one wrist. There were other bloody finger and palm prints here and there over the white nurse’s uniform. I thought that no further evidence was needed to direct the searchers for the woman’s murderer. I myself, though I am no criminologist, saw plainly that those marks had been made there by a female hand.

  I opened the door of the garage and looked out. The dogs had gone away and left me alone, apparently having made up their canine minds that they had no chance of getting at my legs and throat. And that, too, was a strange thing, when I considered it. Surely the brutes must have smelled the fresh blood spilled inside that little building. Why had they not lingered in the close vicinity of it? Why had they not tried frantically to force a way within it? It could only have been that Gray had been outside and had called them away. I did not think that they would have obeyed Hobbs, considering the conditions.

  But now they were not in sight and I could hear nothing of them. Nevertheless, knowing how swiftly they could cover distance about these grounds, I paused for some seconds, carefully taking note of every accident of the ground over which I must run to gain the front door of the house. It was broad day, now. The sunlight had crept over the peaks and down the sides of them, so that the level on which Ormsby stood was bathed in its early splendor. I gathered myself to leap out, drag the door shut behind me, then dart for the house.


  In that moment a car left the screening of a clump of trees between the house and the end of the Ormsby drive, swept up the drive as if its occupants were in great haste, and was brought to a stop before the door, a stop made so suddenly that all four wheels were locked by the brakes and dragged screeching along the gravel. Doctor Barnes, I thought, must be in more haste now than his sleepy response to my call would have allowed anyone to suppose he would be. Maybe I ought to call out to him to come into the garage and be witness to the thing I had discovered. Mrs. Hobbs’s condition did not necessitate his immediate presence. I was just opening my mouth to shout his name, seeing him emerge from the car on its left-hand side, it having been stopped with its rear toward me.

  But I did not call out. The man who left that car on the left-hand side and walked swiftly behind it was not Doctor Barnes, though I had never seen the good doctor. It was Ormond Ormes. And he opened the door on the right-hand side and assisted a woman to alight. She was muffled in a coat the collar of which came well up over her face, while the rest of it covered her body to the knees. So I did not call out to Ormes, nor did I leave the garage at once, as I had fully meant to do.

  My reason for staying where I was, with a recently murdered woman behind me, was purely a personal one. Some may even think it a foolish one. It is not for me to judge of that. I know only that the woman who had alighted from the motor car which Ormond Ormes had driven, and who was now entering his house with him, was the woman who had been, until recently, my wife.